The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In commercial aircraft maintenance operations, current fault isolation and troubleshooting procedures provide some guidance to an airline by recommending procedures for a maintenance person to follow, based on a variety of observations. These procedures are developed during initial design and certification of an aircraft and often provide a variety of ways to address a fault condition.
Of the variety of ways, it is left to the experience of the airline mechanic to decide what course of repair action to follow. This can lead to repeated “shotgun maintenance” where parts are removed/replaced with the hope that a fault condition is repaired. Knowledge of previous fault observations and the outcome of the repair attempts made to address the fault condition will help improve choosing the maintenance task/action when a defect occurs again.
Current tracking of fix effectiveness is performed on aircraft monitored faults. This occurs when fault conditions that an aircraft subsystem detects are reported automatically to a central maintenance computing function. The reports are then collected by an aircraft fault monitoring and fix effectiveness tracking tool. However, the current “automatic” fault recording does not extend to human observed and reported defects, which can be termed “non-monitored defects”. For non-monitored faults, airlines rely on fixed fault isolation procedures supplemented by informal experience based knowledge of line mechanics and maintenance control personnel. Knowledge of historical fix effectiveness and use of this information to select a proper course of action is significantly influenced by individual experience.
The existing use of informal knowledge based on past experience allows for only very limited “learning” of what is the best course of corrective action to take for a specific, given fault observation. Thus, the probability of the maintenance technician selecting a repair action that corrects the fault condition immediately on the first repair attempt is expected to be lower with the current experience-based methods, when compared to an automated and data driven repair effectiveness tracking method. Furthermore, while the mechanic and/or maintenance experience may be effective in some instances in quickly identifying the proper repair action, it still does not allow a maintenance organization to learn effectively from the experience of its individual members. Nor does it facilitate using the accumulated knowledge of individual maintenance persons by an airline or the larger aviation community.